Perhaps you have “Andre the giant” hands, I must admit i dont have a big hands and fingers.
It has several upsides i can rock any Boutique easily, pick my nose and so on, however being close to 50 i must admit i cant see shit on the boutiques without my glasses on, this is where my OG 1974 minimoog really comes in handy with huge knobs [quote=“Nagualizer, post:108, topic:37216, full:true”]

t:

Nobody in the history of electronic music has ever created anything entirely original,

The TB 303 says hi, but I guess it is a subtractive analog synth so in a sense isn’t ENTIRELY original.

Finns:

No they are not

knobgoblin:

The controls were annoyingly/unusably close together and everything just felt squishy and wobbly

That is my experience from trying them in a shop. You need tweezers for some of those knobs.

lionstone:

But how can they be so cheap? If they sound the same, what does Moog offer for 3000 more?

Behringer stuff is mass produced in China, Moog is made in the US in much smaller quantities ( I think).
[/quote]

If Moog decided to build a ‘desktop’ version without a high end trim that was fully manufactured overseas, then it absolutely could have been as cheap or at least significantly less expensive. You’re seeing right now that the parts costs for the Behringer D are probably well under $100. After manufacturing and shipping there’s a nice little profit, then the rest is dealer markup.

Moog knew there was a market willing to pay thousands for a ‘classic’ as used were selling for (IIRC $6-10K). $3K starts to sound like a bargain. They’re largely made and assembled in the US by hand which significantly adds to the cost, but they’re still obviously making a killing on it. And there’s nothing wrong with that… they should get whatever the market is willing to pay.

Maybe Moog will get a little more smart and offer some models fully built overseas with decent, but lesser quality trim as well as desktop units for less. Continue to offer high end versions exclusively built (aside from some of the circuit boards) by hand and tested in the US. They could expand their market share. Probably not though. Seems like they want to maintain a certain reputation and level of exclusivity. Keeping prices high is one way to do that.

I think the 303 has more like a 3-pole (18db/octave) filter, and the way the sequencer is integrated and how the glide and accent work hadn’t been done before but I could be wrong, and this is entirely academic anyway

the way the sequencer is integrated and how the glide and accent work hadn’t been done before

Well yes, but that’s exactly my point. By taking things that have been done before and using those, you arrive at new things. The development of the TB-303 did not happen in isolation.

IMHO the TB-303 is interesting exactly because the people at Roland tried to make a small bass synth with an integrated step sequencers as simple and as cheaply as possible.

The reason the glide has the same duration regardless of the pitch difference is simply because that’s easier to implement.

EDIT: Oh, and I don’t see what’s special or unique about the accents. Routing velocity to both amp and env had been done plenty of times before and is a rather obvious thing to do if you’re trying to emulate how a bass guitar is played.

Well Behringer did say they don’t believe in digital synths… here is the actual quote “We at Behringer do not believe in “virtual analog”, VST’s or other creative names for digital sound emulations as we are of the firm opinion that you cannot replicate true analog sound through digital technology, and there are many technical reasons for this. To be very clear, this doesn’t mean digital synths or VST’s can’t sound great, but it is just something we don’t believe in.” No matter how cheap or good sounding there synths are quotes like this make me never want to give them money… plenty of other ways to get well priced great sounding synths to bother supporting them. My guess is they don’t believe in them because they can’t legally copy paste the code into there synth

Did you made that up or did they really say that in an official statement? I hope they never load Repro-5 and compare it to their “analog” deepmind synth. Could ruin the afternoon.

The discussion about Behringer-D will hopefully calm down a bit when it is released. Maybe it is the cheap analog synth we are waiting for. I´ll give it a chance and look forward to test it at a store.

Behringer cloning digital hardware? pfft dream on… They wouldn’t have a clue unless they magically got a copy of the original source code. That is why I’m guessing we will only see analog hardware clones from them. They’d go bankrupt trying to clone say, a machinedrum :}

I know it’s a totally different sound, and I really like the Behringer D sound, but seeing what all I get in my $299 analogue (Korg Monologue) makes me it appreciate it even more: patch memory; an intuitive sequencer with 16 physical buttons, motion sequencing, and p-locks; battery operated; and a keyboard. Crazy what we can get for $299 nowadays.

Do you have any idea how much a modern smartphone would cost if half of the industrial world wasn’t making, and competing making parts for it? The economies of scale are powerful things, way beyond any funds of a mortal.

In IT tech, volumes of sales are 100 000 x bigger than in music gear… these lil facts affect the final prices so much it isn’t even funny.

Some blurps about Moog becoming a cooperative, and then some info on the production of the model D:

-Moog Music Inc. is now an employee-owned company, following the vision of Dr. Moog who wanted to share the company’s financial success to its employees.

-The new employee-ownership arrangement is more than just happy news for the workers; it’s a victory for the small company, whose financial success has not always matched its cultural impact.

-Many of the employees have had to wait for overdue wages when the company was in tough financial times. Now, with the employee-ownership decision, which is essentially a solid retirement plan, the people at Moog get a financial reward that matches their personal investment in the synthesizer firm…

-Model D-

-Each one is made by hand in its factory using metal sourced from Missouri and wood from Tennessee. In fact, with the exception of a few circuit boards and hard-to-find components, every piece of every Moog synth is sourced from the USA.

-To realize the unmistakable sound of the world’s first performance synthesizer, we preserve the component placement and through-hole design of the original analog circuit boards, employing military-spec precision resistors and custom-reissued transistors to complete the circuit.

"Building a Minimoog isn’t an easy task, nor is it a quick one. Running at full capacity, the Asheville factory can create just 15 Minimoogs in a day, or 30 if it runs a night shift. It takes six people to build and test each product, a process that takes almost three days to complete. “Four people are involved in the physical mechanical construction, taking all the components and the parts and ensuring that each part individually passes our quality standards, that each part goes together correctly that everything is mechanically and physically perfect on the instrument” DeBardi says. “That process for those four people takes about five hours.”

Once the Minimoog is assembled, it’s moved to a rack where it’s plugged in and turned on for 48 hours. This allows each of the circuit board’s capacitors, resistors and LED lights to have electricity passed through them for long enough to identify any faulty components. “There are thousands of these little parts in every instrument, and if any of them are going to fail that’ll happen typically in the first 24 hours of use,” says DeBardi. “So if an LED light’s gonna burn out, it’ll happen on our rack, and we can fix it at the next step of the process as opposed to it happening two months into being in somebody’s home studio.”

After the 48-hour burn-in, the Minimoog is put through an “intense calibration process,” where the synth is taken to an isolated room and a calibration technician makes it ready to play. “A synthesizer needs to be tuned like a guitar, DeBardi says. “With a guitar, you loosen and tighten the tension on the strings to get the instrument in tune with itself. With a synthesizer you are actually loosening and tightening voltage as it passes through specific points in the instrument’s circuit. Our technicians use multimeters, oscilloscopes, strobe tuners and computer programs to visualize what’s going on in there as they do those calibrations. Once the calibrations have been done it goes through what we call a ‘final check’ of the instrument, because even if everything is correct on paper, we recognise that we’re not making a television or a toaster or something that you passively interact with.”

“This is a musical instrument that people are going to use to try and create the ideas that are in the back of their heads, so there’s a very personal relationship that the player has to the instrument, and that’s why we do our final check. We’re ensuring that the way that the instrument is interacted with is a perfect experience; our technicians are trained to know how every knob should feel, how every key should react, what every waveform should look like and sound like, so that when you are interacting with the instrument that experience is perfect every time. So those calibration technicians will actually go through and turn every knob, press every key, perform every major function that the instrument is designed to perform to ensure that they are perfect before it goes out the door.”

PRESETSPlease note that your DFAM is 100% analog, and as a result, each unit has subtle sonic differences due to component tolerances that make it unique. This means that two different units set the same way may sound slightly different. This is normal.